Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Alvin Kass, long-serving NYPD rabbi, mugged on Upper West Side

NYPD Chief Chaplain Rabbi Alvin Kass was mugged near his home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side early Tuesday morning, the New York Post reported.

Kass, 84, was confronted by a man saying he was hungry, who went into Kass’ pockets. The assailant grabbed Kass’ wallet, but it dropped to the ground, and the assailant left without taking anything.

Kass fell in the course of the mugging and hurt his shoulder, but refused medical treatment at the scene. He was previously mugged in 2016, and suffered minor injuries in the attack.

Kass is the longest-serving employee of the NYPD, and has been the top chaplain for 54 years. He has had a storied career, organizing Rosh Hashanah services in LaGuardia Airport after the September 11 attacks, when it was a temporary morgue, and once successfully negotiated with a Jewish kidnapper for the release of a Jewish woman — in exchange for two pastrami sandwiches from the now-shuttered Carnegie Deli.

Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @aefeldman

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.